Welcome to the monkey house

I haven’t written since Nicaragua, and that was nearly two years and a few skins ago. The purpose of this space is communication to those interested, and to have something constructive to procrastinate with. My target audience is not anonymous to me, but I don’t mean to discourage the occasional stumbling passerby.

I am currently approaching the end of my career as a full-time student, at least for the moment. With this event comes a process, and I’m in the midst of sorting that bit out. I’m writing two full-length undergraduate theses in academic areas, helping run an educational forum, and I’m attempting to start an independent bookstore near Troy, NY. Hopefully the bookstore bit works out so that I have some cash to pay off my considerably endowed loans when they come knocking.

I was inspired to start this blog after a friend of mine caved and admitted that she wrote one. I read it, loved it, and figured that I had some similar questions that I wanted to poke at in anonymous public.

I’ve been listening to Trevor Wilson, a fellow student here, (http://www.myspace.com/tvwilson) and thinking about art and myself, as will come as no surprise to anyone who either knows me or tends to read blogs. I attend a very small liberal arts school and most of my friends are constantly creating art. They think in terms of art as life, of art as creation and as discernment. I tend to have a pretty loose definition of what qualifies as ‘art’, but as a more academic student I tend to have a lot of difficulty with creation. Discernment I can do. Analysis I’m great at. Synthesis and invention are my weak points. My work is not art. Not even the most liberal of arts students would approach my essays – my usual form of production – and exclaim over my artistic prowess.

But there is art to be had in academia. I’ve read great works of academic prowess where there is art not only in the writing, but also in the weaving of different analyses and trains of thought into comprehensive, useful, and above all, beautiful arguments. Edward Said does that in Orientalism; Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities; Costas M. Constantinou in On the Way to Diplomacy, the list goes on. Even Roger Lancaster in Life is Hard touches brilliance, and I tend to look down on ethnographies due to their tendency to stereotype and reduce the complexity of entire peoples.

So that is my first difficulty of the term. I want to touch that brilliance in all of my work. Hope you can too.